In the checkout counter tonight, one of the tabloids had the headline, “Twenty Five Years Of Covered-Up Kennedy Scandals Revealed! Murder, Sex, And Drug Abuse!”
I, for one, am just shocked.
And They Didn’t Even Get To Chappaquidick
In the checkout counter tonight, one of the tabloids had the headline, “Twenty Five Years Of Covered-Up Kennedy Scandals Revealed! Murder, Sex, And Drug Abuse!”
I, for one, am just shocked.
And They Didn’t Even Get To Chappaquidick
In the checkout counter tonight, one of the tabloids had the headline, “Twenty Five Years Of Covered-Up Kennedy Scandals Revealed! Murder, Sex, And Drug Abuse!”
I, for one, am just shocked.
Now They’ve Gone Too Far
According to Iowahawk, the academic fraud epidemic is approaching critical mass.
Consider:
…the ongoing feud between Harvard President Lawrence O’Neill and star African-American Studies professor Cornell West. Last year West threatened to lead an exodus of Harvard’s black faculty to Princeton after O’Neill obliquely criticized West’s recording of a hip hop album.
According to sources, O’Neill accused West of being a “punkass newjack sucka MC,” having “whack flow” and “not representin.'”
West angrily defended his rapping skills, retorting that “Tha C-dog be rollin’ hard and gots his shizit on point” and that he was a “Ninja on the mic.” He accused O’Neill of jealousy and sexual impotence, noting that “old punk fool can’t get no fly hos like the C-dog.”
The bitterness over the incident has subsided, but tempers flared briefly when West, O’Neill and their posses crossed paths in Harvard Square after a faculty hydraulic car-bouncing competition.
and
“Unlike that old adage about doers-versus-teachers, I have marketable skills outside academics,” says Agee.
“If worst comes to worst,” he explains, “there’s always journalism.”
Now They’ve Gone Too Far
According to Iowahawk, the academic fraud epidemic is approaching critical mass.
Consider:
…the ongoing feud between Harvard President Lawrence O’Neill and star African-American Studies professor Cornell West. Last year West threatened to lead an exodus of Harvard’s black faculty to Princeton after O’Neill obliquely criticized West’s recording of a hip hop album.
According to sources, O’Neill accused West of being a “punkass newjack sucka MC,” having “whack flow” and “not representin.'”
West angrily defended his rapping skills, retorting that “Tha C-dog be rollin’ hard and gots his shizit on point” and that he was a “Ninja on the mic.” He accused O’Neill of jealousy and sexual impotence, noting that “old punk fool can’t get no fly hos like the C-dog.”
The bitterness over the incident has subsided, but tempers flared briefly when West, O’Neill and their posses crossed paths in Harvard Square after a faculty hydraulic car-bouncing competition.
and
“Unlike that old adage about doers-versus-teachers, I have marketable skills outside academics,” says Agee.
“If worst comes to worst,” he explains, “there’s always journalism.”
Now They’ve Gone Too Far
According to Iowahawk, the academic fraud epidemic is approaching critical mass.
Consider:
…the ongoing feud between Harvard President Lawrence O’Neill and star African-American Studies professor Cornell West. Last year West threatened to lead an exodus of Harvard’s black faculty to Princeton after O’Neill obliquely criticized West’s recording of a hip hop album.
According to sources, O’Neill accused West of being a “punkass newjack sucka MC,” having “whack flow” and “not representin.'”
West angrily defended his rapping skills, retorting that “Tha C-dog be rollin’ hard and gots his shizit on point” and that he was a “Ninja on the mic.” He accused O’Neill of jealousy and sexual impotence, noting that “old punk fool can’t get no fly hos like the C-dog.”
The bitterness over the incident has subsided, but tempers flared briefly when West, O’Neill and their posses crossed paths in Harvard Square after a faculty hydraulic car-bouncing competition.
and
“Unlike that old adage about doers-versus-teachers, I have marketable skills outside academics,” says Agee.
“If worst comes to worst,” he explains, “there’s always journalism.”
More Whistling In The Dark For Gray
Over at Instapundit (you know where it is…over there on the left), Glenn publishes an input from Orrin Judd:
Looking around the web recently, it seems to me that folks (especially in blogdom) are reading California in much the way they read New York in 2000, that is to say, inaccurately. You can string out reasons that a Hillary or a Gray Davis will lose until you are blue in the face, but at the end of the day, they are Democrats in Democratic states and they win. The race it most reminds me of is actually Mitt Romney vs. Ted Kennedy–attractive young GOP businessman vs. obviously outmoded liberal hack. The race looks close in Spring and early Summer but then the Dems come home to the party, hold their noses, and vote for the yellow dog.
There is one difference between those races and this year’s race between Simon and Davis (well, actually there are several, but this is the biggest one). They fall on two different sides of an epochal divide called September 11. I think that people underestimate the change in mood that occurred last fall. I don’t think that Lazio or Romney were ever ahead by eight points in the polls (as Simon seems to be right now, though it’s not getting much ink or pixels). And I don’t think that the Republicans were ahead of the Dems by as much in the Congressional preference polls as they seem to be now.
I think that it’s overly simplistic to call California a “Democratic state.” Even if registered Dems outnumber Republicans, they don’t always outvote them (particularly when many of them are “motor voter” types, who wouldn’t have bothered to register otherwise, and likely won’t find their way to the polls).
Much of California Republican’s problems arise from lack of enthusiasm among their own rank and file for non-entities like Fong and Lundgren. Give them someone to vote for, and they’ll get a much higher turnout than the Dems can have any hope of expecting for Davis (which is why I believe, though we’ll never know now, that win or lose, Simon will do better than Riordan would have).
So I think that Republicans have been losing because they’ve been putting up dud candidates. Maybe Simon will be, too, but I don’t think so. Actually Orrin’s argument is the last one that the Democrats have (not to imply that he’s a Democrat, or not–I don’t know his affiliation). With their candidate, they’ve got a loser on personality, his policies are universally recognized to be a disaster, he’ll be campaigning against a candidate who’ll have stratospherically-popular George Bush and Rudy Giuliani in his corner (probably with regular state visits), and his vaunted money-raising advantage will turn out to be a wash against a wealthy candidate not constrained by donation limits.
Match all that up with the new post-911 mood, and the argument that “the Democrats will come home in November” sounds an awful lot like the argument that “Gore will win in 2000, because the economy’s good.” A lot of political-science/economy professors got a major omelette on their collective faces from that one.
Missing The Point
Over at NRO’s non-blog, The Corner, Kathryn Jean Lopez is appalled that she saw a four-year-old boy searched in Seattle at the boarding gate.
As I was boarding a flight from Seattle to San Francisco, it was clear that the gate agent was merely counting, and sending every n-th person to be searched more thoroughly than the rest of us. The entire line was shocked and appalled when A 4 YEAR OLD BOY was selected as a target of their mindless procedure. He was scared, and his Dad was quite put out (understandably) as the security guy asked him to spread his arms and finagled his metal-detecting wand into his nooks and crannies. (Well, his nooks, anyway.)
We were all aghast, but it seems fruitless to complain about anything in this environment. If we don’t expect airline or security workers to THINK, is it too much to ask that the Sec. of Transportation think? I don’t think so. Isn’t profiling better than THIS?
I think that she, and others who think that children shouldn’t be targeted for searches are missing the real point. I’m opposed to such searches also–not because the targets are children, but because, post-911, for everyone, they are annoying and useless.
Once you accept the logic (as Ms. Lopez seems to) that we really do need to worry about box cutters, nail clippers, and Congressional Medals Of Honor on aircraft, then it actually makes more sense to search a child than, say, a little old lady. After all, how do they know that the child isn’t carrying something that the father slipped on to his person to avoid getting searched himself? Once on the plane, he could simply retrieve it from the kid, and do whatever nefarious acts he could do with a sharp object.
Which is to say, nothing, because he’s be torn limb from limb by crew and passengers, who are the real defense against air terrorism now.
That last is the argument that we need to make, and continue making, instead of whining about who’s being searched and who’s not.
Mr. Mom
The group Students for Individual Liberty is sponsoring a gun control debate at LA Harbor College, in Wilmington, CA. It will be between the Liberty Belles, a pro-2nd-amendment women’s group, and the Million Mom March. The “million moms” are sending a man to debate their side.
Busy Signal
Sorry about the post paucity, but I’ve had a busy weekend, pulling CAT5 cable for a new LAN connection to the spare bedroom (Patricia needs it now that she’s spending more time at home), seeing the latest Cirque du Soleil down in Long Beach (hint–it’s mostly Chinese, and not as good as some earlier shows, but OK), picking up a niece at LAX (returning to USC from spring break) and nursing Patricia, because she’s come down with some throat rot.
Tomorrow I have to finish up a proposal, but there may be some new stuff up in the afternoon (PST).